Azerbaijan says its troops killed two Armenian soldiers and wounded several others in what it calls an attempted attack by an Armenian "saboteur" group against Azerbaijani positions late on November 12.

The Azerbaijani Defense Ministry said in a statement on November 13 that it had suffered no casualties among its soldiers in the incident that took place near the contact line dividing Azerbaijan proper and its breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh.

Nagorno-Karabakh separatist officials confirmed the death of two ethnic Armenian soldiers, saying they were shot dead by Azerbaijani snipers.

Baku and Yerevan have been locked in conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh for a quarter of a century.

Armenia-backed separatists seized the mainly ethnic Armenian-populated region during a war in the early 1990s that killed some 30,000 people.

International diplomatic efforts to settle the conflict have brought little progress.